Israeli
Roots of Hamas are being exposed

by Dean
Andromidas

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Speaking in Jerusalem Dec. 20, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel
Kurtzer made the connection between the growth of the Islamic fundamentalist
groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Israel's promotion of the Islamic
movement as a counter to the Palestinian nationalist movement. Kurtzer's
comments come very close to EIR's own presentation of the evidence of
Israel's instrumental role in establishing Hamas, and its ongoing control of
that organization.

Kurtzer said that the growth of the Islamic movement in the Palestinian
territories in recent decades—"with the tacit support of Israel"—was "not
totally unrelated" to the emergence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their
terrorist attacks against Israel. Kurtzer explained that during the 1980s,
when the Islamic movement began to flourish in the West Bank and Gaza,
"Israel perceived it to be better to have people turning toward religion
rather than toward a nationalistic cause [the Palestinian Liberation
Organization—ed.]." It therefore did little to stop the flow of money to
mosques and other religious institutions, rather than to schools.

According to the Dec. 21 Israeli daily Ha'aretz, Kurtzer made these
extraordinary statements at a seminar on religion and politics sponsored by
Oz V'Shalom-Netivot Shalom, a largely Anglo-American organization that
promotes peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Rabbi Dr. Aharon
Lichtenstein, the head of Har Etzion Yeshiva in Alon Shvut, who is an active
advocate of a just regional peace, also spoke. Kurtzer said that as a result
of the growth of Islam at the expense of education, there are now
Palestinians who are "determined terrorists that use religious beliefs in a
perverted way to appeal to the masses."

Kurtzer said that cultural and religious interaction is potentially a way
to "build bridges." But instead, "the perverted use of religion in the
region is today becoming one of the great challenges for the years ahead."
He said that there is no "inherent component" in Islam that advocates
violence. But one of the five principles of Islam, jihad—resistance—"in
classic religious associations connotes religious belief and fervor, not
violence." But extremists have distorted the meaning of jihad, so it now has
a connotation of violence in the service of a religious purpose.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend This statement is extraordinary given
the fact that Kurtzer is a very senior diplomat, having held the post of
Ambassador to Egypt just prior to going on to Tel Aviv. He is also an
Orthodox Jew who is not shy of criticizing the extreme anti-Israeli and
anti-Semitic views held by certain Arab circles. But Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon rarely grants the United States' highest representative in
Israel an official audience.

The ambassador's comments are an acknowledgment of what any serious
Middle East observers knows: Hamas has always been seen as a tool by which
Israel could undermine the nationalist movement led by Palestinian Authority
President and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser
Arafat. Similar statements by Arafat have been dismissed by Israel as
"cranky" propaganda. In an interview with the Dec. 11 Italian daily
Corriere della Sera, Arafat said,

"We are doing everything to stop the violence. But Hamas is a
creature of Israel which at the time of Prime Minister [Yitzhak] Shamir
[the late 1980s, when Hamas arose], gave them money and more than 700
institutions, among them schools, universities and mosques. Even [former
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin ended up admitting it, when I
charged him with it, in the presence of [Egpytian President Hosni]
Mubarak."

To the Italian daily L'Espresso, Arafat laid out the reasons for this
support. "Hamas was constituted with the support of Israel. The aim was to
create an organization antagonistic to the PLO. They received financing and
training from Israel. They have continued to benefit from permits and
authorizations, while we have been limited, even to build a tomato factory.
Rabin himself defined it as a fatal error. Some collaborationists of Israel
are involved in these [terror] attacks," he said. "We have proof, and we are
placing it at the disposal of the Italian government."

On one level the support for Hamas is simply the application of the old
saying, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Indeed, in the minds of crude
Israeli ultra-nationalists and fascists such as Sharon and his faction, this
is indeed the case. Sharon is not interested in peace and therefore is not
concerned that the violence and needless deaths of Israelis and Palestinians
continue. In the Jan. 3 Ha'aretz, Yossi Sarid, chairman of the Meretz party,
wrote, "What does frighten Sharon ... is any prospect or sign of calm or
moderation. If the situation were to calm down and stabilize, Sharon would
have to return to the negotiating table and, in the wake of pressure from
within and without, he would have to raise serious proposals for an
agreement. This moment terrifies Sharon and he wants to put it off for as
long as he possibly can." In contrast, Sarid said that Sharon understands
"that the terrorists and those who give them asylum are not the real
enemies. Instead, the real enemies are the moderates.... You fight
terrorists—a pretty simple operation—but you must talk with moderates, and
this is a very tricky, if not dangerous, business."

More important for the survival of not only the Palestinian people, but
especially Israel itself, is the dangerous role of the puppetmasters outside
the region, who are manipulating both sides of this deadly game as part of
their own demonic plans to spread the policy of a "clash of civilizations."
In this regard, Sharon, and his "Greater Israel" policy, is just as much a
puppet as the Palestinian, strapped with explosives, who blows himself up at
an Israeli bus station.

Two Decades of Undermining Arafat Given the level of control that the
Israeli intelligence services such as the Shin Bet and Mossad have been able
to exert over the Palestinian territories during the last 35 years of
Israeli occupation, the capability to manipulate militant and violent
organizations, such as those associated with Hamas, should not surprise
anyone familiar with intelligence and even routine police operations. This
should be obvious, considering that Israel has routinely recruited thousands
of collaborators and provocateurs among the tens of thousands of
Palestinians who have passed through Israeli prisons in over 35 years of its
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Most convincing is a comparison of the development of Hamas, Islamic
Jihad and their antecedents, and the growing national and international
legitimacy of the PLO and its undisputed leader, Arafat.

Hamas is an acronym for Harafat al-Muqawama Al-Islamiyya, or Islamic
Resistance Movement. Its spiritual leader is Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who,
despite his fiery anti-Israeli sermons, has had an unusual relationship with
the Israeli authorities. In 1973, Yassin established the Islamic
Association—at a time when it was Israeli policy to promote what Ambassador
Kurtzer refers to as the "Islamic movement."

One might ask: Why should Israel promote an Islamic movement which later
turns around and attacks it? How could the Israeli secret services be taken
in by a Yassin? They weren't. The simple fact is, that the stated policy of
Hamas is simply the flip side of Sharon's "Greater Israel" policy that
refuses to seek a territorial compromise. The Hamas charter in 1988 stated,
"The land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations,
and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or
abandon it or part of it.... Peace initiatives, the so-called peace
initiatives, are all contraray to the beliefs of Hamas, for renouncing any
part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion." In this rhetoric
there is no room for a state of Israel—as there is none for a state of
Palestine in Sharon's "Greater Israel."

Israel's Hamas relations intensified after the Arab League, in 1974,
decided to recognize Arafat and the PLO as the representatives of the
Palestinian people—in effect, a government in exile. By 1979, top Yassin
acquired an official permit from the Israeli government of Prime Minister
Menachem Begin. This coincided with the signing of the Camp David peace
treaty between Israel and Egypt. That treaty embodied detailed clauses
calling for the establishment of a Palestinian Authority in the Occupied
Territories, which would be the precursor for the Israeli withdrawal and the
establishment of a Palestinian state. Gen. Ariel Sharon has been the chief
proponent since this treaty was signed, of the policy of ensuring that these
clauses would never be implemented. His chosen alternatives were war in
Lebanon and the expansion of the Jewish settlements in the Occupied
Territories. Sharon was helped by the assassination of Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat by Anglo-American-controlled, Egypt-based Islamic terrorists.

`Policy of Strengthening Islamic Bodies' Israeli toleration, if not
initial sponsorship of the Islamic movement, has been acknowledged and well
documented in Israeli sources. In 1997, the Jaffee Center for Strategic
Studies, at Tel Aviv University, published a study, "Hamas: Radical Islam In
A National Struggle," authored by Anat Kurz and Nahman Tal. It stated that
the Islamic Association, "the platform of which contained no nationalist
clauses, obtained a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration in 1979 to
conduct its activities. The permit was apparently consistent with the
Israeli policy of strengthening Islamic bodies as a counterweight to
Palestinian nationalist groups."

The rapid expansion of the Islamic Association led to clashes on the
Palestinian University campuses in the Occupied Territories in the 1980s,
betwen PLO-affiliated students and those associated with the Islamists. This
expansion was aided by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, where Sharon
hoped to solve the "Palestinian problem" by militarily crushing the
PLO—which was then based in Lebanon—and by carrying out genocide against the
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in impoverished refugee camps
in Lebanon. Despite his orchestration of the massacre of thousands of
Palestinians, including women and children, at the Sabra and Chatila refugee
camps, Sharon failed to eliminate Arafat. Nonetheless, Arafat and the PLO
were exiled to Tunisia, their influence severely weakened.

Sheikh Yassin, along with other Hamas leaders, was arrested in 1984,
after it was discovered that the Islamic Association had maintained arms
caches. But the organization was not banned. In fact, Yassin was soon
released as part of an unprecedented prisoner exchange between Israel and
Ahmed Jabril's PFLP-General Command. This deal, made with one of the most
violent of all anti-PLO Palestinian groups at the time, was made in a period
when the Mossad was busy assassinating the most moderate of PLO leaders.

Then, in 1988, the Islamic Association created Hamas as a direct
alternative to the PLO, which had launched the first Intifada the year
before. 1988 was also important because the PLO, at the 19th Conference of
the Palestinian National Council in Algeria in 1988, accepted the United
Nations Security Council resolution of 1947 calling for two states in
Palestine. They also called for convening an international peace conference
based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which established the land-for-peace
concept. This was a de facto recognition of Israel by the PLO and Arafat. By
the end of 1988, the Reagan Administration extended official recognition to
the PLO as the official representative of the Palestinian people.

When Palestinian leader Abu Jihad began negotiating with Hamas, in an
attempt to win its mass base over to the new policy, he was promptly
assassinated by the Mossad.

Yassin, as all senior leaders of Hamas, is a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, the far-flung international Islamic organization with
operations throughout the Islamic world. In the past, Anglo-American
factions have not hesitated to manipulate the Brotherhood's various factions
to destabilize secular Arab regimes. When Zbigniew Brzezinski launched the
Afghan war against Russia in the 1980s, many of the Arab mujahideen fighters
were recruited through Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks. The Muslim
Brotherhood story fills volumes; the crucial point here is that Hamas, one
of its branches, has traditionally stood in opposition to the secular
nationalism of Arafat, the PLO, and its supporting governments.

Hamas has a peculiar organizational structure which contrasts sharply
with that of the PLO. While within the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas exists as a
broad political movement, its militant wings, the Izza-Din Al Qassam and
Islamic Jihad, split-offs from the organization, are administered totally
separately. These latter organizations, which are responsible for the
attacks, are under the control of leaders who operate from abroad. Their
offices are in London, where the group's magazine, Falatin Al Muslimah, is
based; Jordan; Syria; and the United States, particularly in Virginia and
Texas. Although Arafat has periodically tried to bring the popular base of
Hamas into the Palestinian fold, the foreign-based military leadership has
always opposed him.

This bifurcation dovetails with Sharon's strategy of launching brutal
attacks against Hamas targets, in order to elicit the equally brutal
response from Islamic Jihad and the Izza-Din Al Qassam. Thus Arafat, and
diplomatic goals, are undermined, and the fires of civil war within the
Occupied Territories are stoked.

The Anti-Oslo Terror Campaign Begins The Oslo Accords marked the first
glimmer of hope for a resolution of the Middle East conflict. And, the first
suicide terrorist attack aimed at destroying it was not launched by Hamas or
Islamic Jihad or another Palestinian faction. The first suicide attack was
launched on Feb. 25, 1994, by Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein, when he
entered the Mosque of Hebron and killed 50 Muslim worshippers as well as
himself. Goldstein was a member of Kach, the terrorist organization founded
by the late Meir Kahane, who also founded the Jewish Defense League in the
1960s in the United States. Kach, which is well connected to Sharon, is on
the official U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations.

The unprecedented massacre was calculated to set the stage for a suicide
bombing campaign by Hamas and its split-off, Islamic Jihad, over the next
year. In fact, it set into motion the "cycle of violence" that has yet to
end. The Goldstein attack came at precisely the point when Israeli Prime
Minister Rabin and Arafat began the formal implementation of the Oslo
agreement which envisioned the establishment of a Palestinian state by 1998.
The first Hamas-linked suicide attacks did not start until two months later,
in April 1994, when Rabin and Arafat signed the agreement for the
establishment of the Palestinian National Authority. The agreement called
for the conduct of free elections throughout the territories—which would
eventually establish the international legitimacy of the Arafat-led
government.

But despite this terror campaign, which lasted for months under a massive
crackdown by Arafat's security forces, the Rabin-Arafat alliance, although
seriously weakened, was not broken. This alliance was finally broken with
Rabin's assassination by an Israeli, on Nov. 5, 1995.

The next phase of attacks followed the "targetted assassination" of Hamas
bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash on Jan. 5, 1996. Although said to be "revenge
attacks," they were in fact part of Hamas' campaign to get Benjamin
Netanyahu elected Israeli prime minister. This was admitted by Ibraham
Ghawshah, Hamas' official spokesman resident in Amman, Jordan. He said that
it was part of their strategy to influence Israeli public opinon to bring
down the entire Oslo process. The election of Netanyahu indeed fulfilled all
their hopes, especially after he launched his own provocations, which not
only brought about the pre-calculated Hamas response, but also brought the
region several times to the brink of war.

This tit-for-tat campaign reached the height of insanity when Netanyahu,
under the direction of Sharon, who was a member of his government at the
time, launched a Mossad assassination attempt in 1997 against the
Jordan-based Hamas official Khalid Mishaal. Not only did the attempt fail,
but it led to Israel agreeing to release Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh
Yassin from an Israeli jail, where he had been under arrest since 1989.
Yassin was allowed to return to Gaza to rally Hamas against the Oslo process
in general, and Arafat in particular.

This pattern has continued to this very day. Netanyahu's downfall in 1999
led to the short-lived government of Ehud Barak, who despite much talking
and negotiating, furthered the Oslo process not one iota. By the end of the
Summer of 2000, the stage was set for Sharon's ultimate provocation, his
Sept. 28 march on to the Islamic holy site Al-Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount.

Since coming to power, Sharon has done everything to ensure the collapse
of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. If successful, it would either
bring Hamas to power or lead to political chaos within the terrorities.